Submission material and details

Call Abstract

We are pleased to announce a Planetary and Space Science special issue entitled « Enabling Open and Interoperable Access to Planetary Science and Heliophysics Databases and Tools ». This special issue is linked to three scientific sessions held last year at the Japanese Geoscience Union Meeting (Session P-PS02, JpGU, May 2015, Tokyo, Japan), the European Planetary Science Conference (Session MT9, EPSC, Sept. 2015, Nantes, France) and the American Geophysical Union (Sessions IN33E and IN41E, AGU, Dec. 2015, San Francisco, California, USA).

The large amount of data generated by modern space missions calls for a change of organization of data distribution and access procedures. Although long term archives exist for telescopic and space-borne observations, high-level functions need to be developed on top of theses repositories to make Planetary Science and Heliophysics data more accessible and to favor interoperability. Results of simulations and reference laboratory data also need to be integrated to support and interpret the observations. Interoperable software and interfaces has recently been developed in many scientific domains. The Virtual Observatory (VO) interoperable standards developed for Astronomy by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) can be adapted to Planetary Sciences, as demonstrated by the VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access) team within the Europlanet-H2020-RI project. Other communities have developed their own standards: GIS (Geographic Information System) for Earth and planetary surfaces tools, SPASE (Space Physics Archive Search and Extract) for space plasma, PDS4 (NASA Planetary Data System, version 4) and IPDA (International Planetary Data Alliance) for planetary mission archives, etc, and an effort to make them interoperable altogether is starting, including automated workflows to process related data from different sources.

The goal of this special issue is to provide an overview of progresses in Planetary Sciences and Heliophysics interoperability frameworks, ongoing data management and distribution projects, and use cases of VO, GIS and SPASE applications with a focus on science activities and success stories.

Special Issue main dates:- April 11th 2016: opening of the submission process- September 5th 2016: closing of the submission process- May 31st 2017: end of review process and acceptance deadline